It’s been over a week since I started Camp NaNo and I’m already a little bit behind. I can’t entirely blame myself though (doesn’t every NaNo-er say that?). Yesterday it took a solid two hours to try to get server patching done for work. I had an hour to detox my brain before heading to bed for the night. There simply aren’t enough hours in the day to do what we want.

I added an interesting piece into my novel over lunch: a moral debate between Shaleigh and another creature. I’m no good at riddles, so I knew better than to make one of those up. I thought a morale debate would shine a bit more light on the values of this world and on Shaleigh’s own faulty logic. When I was explaining it to a fellow writer earlier, I equated it to the ferries debate in The Dark Knight. Being a Batman fan, I find everything is easier to explain when I put it in Dark Knight terms.

So I don’t want to go into too many details, but suffice it to say Shaleigh isn’t very good at it, even though she thinks she is. She gets it wrong and has to deal with the consequences for not “thinking outside of the box”. This is a YA book, and as such I feel compelled to put a few pieces in here that require a deeper reading. What I would like to coin as a “mind worm”. Something for the reader to walk away with that nags at them as they too try to figure out how they would answer such a question. I would love to put more of these worms into this novel, but it all depends on if the inspiration strikes and it fits the plot. Still it was fun to put together, even if it will need some tweaking & streamlining later.

In other news, I needed some inspiration for this world, so I’ve started a Pinterest board. In retrospect I probably could have gotten a lot more written if I hadn’t been browsing for inspiration, but hey, that’s research right? 🙂

Project: Madam Cloom’s Garden

Summary: Shaleigh’s world is so complicated, that it’s no wonder she’s known for being rebellious and argumentative at school. With her father constantly crying over what he’s lost, and a friend going through major life changes, Shaleigh finds herself feeling more and more out of touch with the people around her. She feels isolated, ignored, and angry.

Then she and her father get into a car accident, and her entire world changes. When she’s greeted by a talking stone animal, she realizes that she’s either dead, crazy, or in another world. But the beautiful land Shaleigh has landed in has its dark secrets, and she’s not as welcome there as she believes.

Current Word Count: 15,674

New Words Written Today: 2,253

Progress: Shaleigh loses a moral debate and takes a creepy ride.

Total Words for 2013: 18,851